What makes a great outdoor store?
Owner Nate Hoe on building one of America's best outdoor shops, championing under-the-radar brands, and why great retail still beats endless scrolling.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of Shop Talk, a series where we sit down with independent multi-brand retailers to talk about their stores, the brands they’re excited about, and what they’re seeing on the retail floor.
With this monthly series, we hope to recreate that feeling of discovery, whether you’re wandering into a neighborhood shop for the first time or falling down the rabbit hole of a really good online store.
To kick things off, we’re chopping it up with Nate Hoe, founder of Seattle-based Windthrow.
Since opening in Capitol Hill in April 2023, the shop has quickly become one of my favorites in the U.S. The brand mix is ridiculously dialed: running, hiking, climbing, weird-ass backpacks, and even camping stoves, chairs, and lanterns.
I still remember scrolling through Windthrow’s website and discovering brands I’d never heard of before, which is kind of the whole point, isn’t it?
Ahead, Nate shares what Windthrow is all about, the brands currently crushing it, why “we can’t dress like farmers forever,” and what the hell it’s actually like running a brick-and-mortar shop in the age of endless scrolling.
For readers who may not be familiar with Windthrow, how would you describe the shop and the kind of customer you serve?
Windthrow is an outdoors store that sells apparel, accessories, and gear from all over the world.
Some may label us "progressive outdoor," some may use the G-word (gorp), and others may simply call us "expensive." We feature a mix of items like highly technical running gear, esoteric puffers, and more casual styles, mixed together with outdoor staples like freeze-dried food, tent stakes, and stove fuel.
We are proud to have customers all over the world but are rooted in our immediate community in Seattle. We serve everyone from casual hikers to ultramarathoners to people who just love clothes. We're a mixed bag, and we love it that way.
What do you look for in a brand before deciding to bring it into the store?
Sameness permeates every aspect of culture these days, and the explosion in popularity of running, hiking, etc. has led to many new brands that talk a lot without actually saying anything.
You can feel the VC backing the minute you open the email. I'm a huge product nut and look at the actual offering before anything else.
Yes, brand and presence are deeply important, but what does any of this bring to the table in a real, physical way? Sometimes the brand itself can be that, but everything at Windthrow functions as well as it looks.
Are there any newer brands in the shop that the team is especially excited about right now?
A lot of our brand roster is pretty young, honestly. For more activewear, Portal and UNNA continue to impress and gather big fanbases in their short time in existence.
Vancouver's Colin Meredith is also a perennial favorite. Our friends at Milan's Rayon Vert share a similar wacky sensibility with us and do such a good job pushing the envelope.
There's a lot of progression in the bag space right now as well, with Taiwan's Sealson and California's Pa'lante consistently providing new and exciting offerings. Portland's gnuhr has also maintained a red-hot energy since its debut a few years ago. We're proud to be one of their first stockists, and their success is so well deserved.
Has there been a brand that's surprised you with how well it's resonated with customers?
The popularity of our in-house line has been a pleasant surprise.
This season has been resonating really well with people, and while we put a lot of work into it, I didn't fully expect it to be so well received. So that's nice!
Sweden's Klättermusen has also recently revamped its apparel, and that's been quite popular. You love to see a brand make a conscious decision to court a new customer and have it work out.
We brought in Finland's Tarvas this past winter, and I was curious how our customers would react to a shoe that's "dressier" and less technical. Surprise, surprise—they love it.
What trends are you seeing in menswear at the moment? Are there any you're excited about or any you hope fade away?
Hopefully we leave neutral hell at some point, but Windthrow can be part of the problem as well. With sportswear, it's understandable that people want more muted earth tones—the conventional marketplace is full of fluo clown barf.
But I am excited to see patterns (slowly) making their way back into popularity and hope for wilder stuff in the future. We can't dress like farmers forever! Brands like London's SOAR do such a good job using wild patterns and colors. More of that, please.
What's it like running a physical retail store in 2026? Have you noticed any changes in how customers are shopping in-store versus online?
If Substack and Instagram are to be believed, brick-and-mortar is more popular than ever.
Cool multi-brand shops are popping up constantly. This is definitely a good thing, but it masks the persistent challenges of operating a business like this. You have the mega-retailers getting smarter all the time and gobbling up the brands you sell, only to discount them deeply and early.
Then you have the persistent appeal of DTC, with customers coming to you as a last-ditch effort to find the item they want—they're not curious about your selection or perspective. In short, stores must now function as brands themselves to stand out and survive. Simply carrying cool labels doesn't move the needle for people who learn everything from the timeline.
Online shopping tends to be more targeted, while in-store browsing can naturally lead to more discovery. But I honestly think each experience possesses a bit of both. I've personally stumbled across amazing things while aimlessly browsing a webstore.
We care a lot about both of these customers and always want to introduce people to new things and invoke curiosity.
